Social class. Political imaginaries and figurations
Antonio Gómez Villar
As a heuristic category, “working class” had the analytical capacity of organizing the historical evidence of industrial society from the 19th to the mid-20th centuries around factories, class institutions, class culture, political parties and trade unions. Social classes became a complete social fact, a collective vision of the world, the “historical point of view”, the great narrative that drove all other demands, a specific way of reading social questions and of structuring the forms of political representation around class conflicts.
The link between the working class and social questions was a product of industrial society and the exhaustion of the Old Regime. The crisis of this link marks another transition: the major transformation of the factory regime and the mutations of globalized capitalism. It is as obvious that the working class has not disappeared as it is that its cultural references have entered into crisis. This research project aims to address various theoretical debates and political situations related to the structuring capacity of class, its potential to frame political representations and identities, and the experience of class today.
Antonio Gómez Villar is a professor of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona (UB), co-director of the Barcelona Pensa Philosophy Festival and a member of the Institute of Cultural Studies and Social Change (IECCS). His main lines of research are the ways in which the conceptual field of class has been redefined in response to the transformation of subjectivities and new cultural and political relations, and the analysis of collective action repertoires from an antagonistic perspective. He is the author of books such as Los olvidados. Ficción de un proletariado reaccionario (Bellaterra, 2022) and Ernesto Laclau y Chantal Mouffe: hegemonía y populismo (Gedisa, 2021), and co-edited the books Maradona, un mito plebeyo (Ned, 2021) and Working Dead. Escenarios del postrabajo (La Virreina, 2019) with María Ruido and Marta Echaves.
Image: Voula Papaioannou, Barricades during the December 1944 civil war in Athens.
